PROLOGUE

Tristan,

You just called and I didn’t answer. That’s on me and I realize it. I’m being a child. I’m being weak. I’m being a coward. I’m doing what you tried for years to do with me—keep your distance. Only our reasons are very different. You pushed me away because you didn’t need me close. I’m pushing you away because I do.

The truth is, my head is in a crazy place right now. I’m not sure what’s made me hit this downward spiral so quickly, but I have. When I speak with you, it fucks with my head. Again, my issue, not yours. The problem is that I’ve become so accustomed to picking up the phone when I need or want to speak with you—most of the time pretending it was for your benefit rather than mine—that I still need it. I need that connection which fucks with my head even more.

There’s so much I’ve never told you. Things I probably never will tell you even if I write them down. You see, you won’t get this letter. If I write more, you won’t get those, either. I just need to talk to you. That’s nothing new though, is it? I’ve always been the one who needed you, which in some ways is ironic.

I’ve never needed anyone other than you.

I thought, eventually, you would need me the same way.

In reality, you never needed anyone until them.

We’ve covered that. I don’t know why I mentioned it again. Maybe if I say it enough, I’ll get it through my thick fucking skull and it’ll stop me from being weak for you. That’s what you do to me. It’s not your fault, but you make me weak.

I thought I got over that, being weak. I was weak my whole childhood. I never wanted to be that again.

I don’t want to think about what that says about me.

So, I won’t.

I’ll go to the club, find someone to fuck and forget the weak man I’ve again become.

Ben

CHAPTER ONE

Ben had nothing to do with his time other than fuck.

He stopped working not long after Javier’s murder. People understood. He’d been through so much, they said; kidnapped, beaten, forced to murder. They didn’t know that wasn’t true. He hadn’t killed but he wished he had. Ben saw the man’s face almost every time he closed his eyes. Smelled Javier’s rank breath as he told Ben what he would do to him—what he would do to Tristan, Josiah and Mateo.

It hadn’t mattered what Javier threatened to do to Ben.

It made him an asshole, but it hadn’t mattered much what he promised to do to Josiah or Mateo, either.

What mattered was Tristan. It had always been Tristan and that knowledge continued to screw with him. After all this time, he should be over the man. Should have been a long time ago. The weakness ate away at his insides but he still couldn’t stop it. Couldn’t stop letting Tristan wreck him.

It wasn’t his ex’s fault. Tristan never made him promises.

Yet Ben had wanted to be the one to kill for him. He would have been okay had Javier’s blood been on his hands—which was a big fucking deal for him. Ben didn’t do blood, not after Bonnie. But he’d never been able to do anything for Tristan except give him release. Let Tristan fuck him and use him and be Tristan’s toy, even though it wasn’t something he did for anyone else.

No one else fucked him.

No one else used him.

Yet letting Tristan do it had set him free.

Ben had hoped that giving Tristan his men by ensuring Mateo’s freedom would help.

It didn’t.

After pouring another glass of top-shelf bourbon, Ben downed it in three quick swallows.

The heat of it felt good, one of the only things that felt good anymore. Drinking and fucking, only the fucking wasn’t curing him the way he wanted it to.

Screwing was his fall back when shit went bad. It had been since he started at fifteen—and soon after when he began sneaking into clubs. The rush of it got him hard. The thrill of fucking men he didn’t know. The threat of getting caught. Back then it had been the temptation, the desire to show his father who he was and ruin his career—like playing with fire and hoping to get burned. That if he did, he would pull down the whole Worthington family with him.

He hadn’t been strong enough to do it, though, so he just fucked.

Then, in college, he met Tristan. From the start he’d known Tristan was different. Ben inserted himself into Tristan’s life and then became Tristan’s toy, and he found something he needed.

Something better than the clubs and something real, unlike the sex he’d always had before.

But it had only been real to Ben, not to Tristan, and now here he was back to his old ways.